Big Fish (11 page)

In Which He Has a Dream

M
y dying father has a dream that he is dying. At the same time, it is a dream about me.

It goes like this: as news of my father's illness spread, mourners began to gather in the yard, first just a few, but soon there were many, a dozen, then two, then half-a- hundred people, all standing around in the yard, ruining the shrubbery, crushing the monkey grass, huddling beneath the carport when it rained. Shoulder to shoulder in my father's dream they swayed and moaned, waiting for word of recovery. Barring that, a glimpse of my father at the bathroom window as he passed before it sent up a wild and glorious cheer. My mother and I watched from the living-room window, unsure of what to do. Some of the mourners looked poor. They wore old, ragged clothes and their faces were dark with hair. They made my mother feel uneasy; she fingered the buttons on her blouse as she watched them stare sadly at the second-floor windows. But there were others who looked as if they had left some very important job to come to my father's house and mourn. They had removed their ties and stuffed them in their pockets, the sides of their fine black shoes were rimmed with mud, and some of them had portable phones, which they used to communicate the proceedings to those who couldn't be here. Men and women, young and old alike all looked upward toward the light of my father's window, waiting. Nothing really happened for a long time. I mean, it was just our life, with the people outside in the yard. But the fact of it became too much, and after a few weeks of it my mother asked me to ask them to go.

And so I did. By this time, though, they were entrenched. A rudimentary buffet had been established beneath the magnolia, where they served bread and chili and steamed broccoli. They kept bothering my mother for forks and spoons, which were returned with the chili still on them, cold and hard to remove. A small tent city had appeared on the patch of open grass where I used to play touch football with some of the neighborhood kids, and word had it that a baby had been born there. One of the businessmen with the portable phones had set up a small information center on a tree stump, and people came to him if they wanted to get messages out to loved ones far away, or to find out if there had been any news of my father.

But in the middle of it all sat an older man in a lawn chair, overseeing everything. I'd never seen him before to my knowledge (or so went my father's dream) but he looked somehow familiar—a stranger, and yet no foreigner to me. Occasionally someone came to him and said something close to his ear. He would listen thoughtfully, consider for a moment what the man had said, and then either nod or shake his head. He had a thick white beard and glasses, and he wore a fishing cap, in which several handmade lures were pinned. And so as he seemed to be some kind of leader, I went to see him first.

There was someone whispering to him as I ap
proached, and as I opened my mouth to speak he raised a hand to quiet me. After the man had finished speaking the old man shook his head, and the messenger hurried off. Then the old man lowered his hand and looked at me.

“Hello,” I said. “I'm—”

“I know who you are,” he said. His voice was soft and deep, warm and distant at the same time. “You are his son.”

“That's right,” I said.

We looked at each other, and as we did I tried to recall a name, for surely we had met somewhere before. But nothing came.

“You have some word for us?”

He watched me with rapt attention, almost seizing me with his stare. He was a most imposing man, my father told me.

“None,” I said. “I mean, he's about the same, I guess.”

“The same,” the man said, weighing the words carefully as if to derive some special meaning. “He's still swimming, then?”

“Yes,” I said. “Every day. He really loves it.”

“This is good,” he said. And suddenly he raised his voice and shouted, “He is still swimming!” And a great cry of rejoicing arose from the crowd. The man's face was radiant. For a few moments he breathed deeply through his nose, and seemed to think things over. Then he looked at me again.

“But there's something else you came to tell us, isn't there?”

“There is,” I said. “It's just that, I know you mean well, and you all seem very nice. But I'm afraid that—

“We must go,” the man said calmly. “You want us to leave.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm afraid so.”

The old man took this in. His head seemed to nod briefly, as if it were moved by the news. This is the scene my father watched in his dream, as if, he said, from a distance, as though he were already dead.

“It will be hard,” the old man said, “to go. These people—they really care. They'll be lost without this place. Not for long, of course. Lives have a way of getting on with themselves. But in the short run it will be hard. Your mother—”

“It makes her nervous,” I said. “All these people in the yard, day and night. You can understand that.”

“Of course,” he said. “And there's the mess, too. We've almost completely destroyed the front yard.”

“There is that.”

“Not to worry,” he said, in a way that made me believe him. “We shall leave it as we found it.”

“She'll be pleased.”

A woman ran up to me then and grabbed my shirt in her hands and rubbed her sobbing face against it, as if to de­termine my corporeality.

“William Bloom?” she said, and looked at me imploringly. She was a small woman, with thin wrists. “You
are
William Bloom, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I said, moving back a step or two, but she still clung to me. “I am.”

“Give this to your father,” she said, and thrust into my hand a miniature silk pillow.

“Healing herbs in a little pillow,” she said. “I made it myself. They might help.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I'll see to it he gets them.”

“He saved my life, you know,” she said. “There was a great fire. He risked his own life to save mine. And here—here I am today.”

“Not for long,” the old man said. “He's asked us to leave.”

“Edward?” she said. “Edward Bloom has asked us to leave?”

“No,” he said. “His wife and son.”

She nodded.

“As you said it would be,” she said. “The son would come to us and ask us to leave. It is just as you said.”

“My mother asked me to,” I said, becoming frustrated with the mysterious talk and sly innuendo. “This is not something I enjoy.”

And suddenly there was a great collective gasp. Every
one was looking toward the windows on the second floor, where my father stood waving at the people in his dream. He was in his yellow bathrobe, smiling at them, occasionally picking someone out in the crowd he recognized and point
ing, raising his eyebrows, and mouthing a word or two
—
Are you okay? Good to see you
!
—before moving on to someone else. Everyone waved, shouted, cheered, and then, after what seemed a visit of immensely brief proportions, he waved once again, and turned, and disappeared into the semidarkness of his room.

“Well,” the old man said, beaming, “that was something, wasn't it? He looked good. He looked very good.”

“You're taking good care of him,” a woman said.

“Keep up the good work!”

“I owe everything to your father!” someone called to me from beneath the magnolia, and what followed was a cacophony of voices, pure babble, telling some story or other about Edward Bloom and his good deeds. I felt surrounded by all the words. Then I felt surrounded: a converging line had formed around me, people talking all at once, until the old man raised his hand and shushed them, and they backed away.

“See,” the old man said. “We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us jobs, lent us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That's why we're here, William. We're a part of him, of who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don't understand, do you?”

I didn't. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father's dream I remembered where we'd met before.

“And what did my father do for you?” I asked him, and the old man smiled.

“He made me laugh,” he said.

And I knew. In the dream, my father told me, I knew. And with that I walked through the yard and down the walk and back into the warmth of my glowing home. “Why does an elephant have a trunk?” I heard the old man bellow in his strong, deep voice, just as I closed the door. “Because he doesn't have a glove compartment,” I mouthed along with him.

Followed by a great burst of laughter.

Thus ends my dying father's dream about his death.

In Which He Buys a Town, and More

T
his next story rises from the mist of the past like a shadow.

Hard work, good luck, and a number of canny investments make my father a wealthy man. We move to a bigger house, a nicer street, and my mother stays at home and raises me, and as I grow my father continues to work hard as ever. He is gone weeks at a time, and comes home tired and sad, with little to say other than he missed us.

Thus, despite his great success no one seems happy. Not my mother, not me, and certainly not my father. There is even talk of disbanding the family altogether, it looks and acts so unlike one. But this doesn't happen. Opportunities come in disguise sometimes. My parents decide to see the hard times through.

It is during these times, the mid-seventies, when my father begins to spend his money in unpredictable ways. One day he realizes that there is something missing in his life. Or rather it's a feeling that comes over him slowly as he
ages—he'd just turned forty—until one day he finds himself,
quite by accident, stuck. In a little town called Specter. Specter, a town somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia. Stuck there because his car has broken down. He has his car towed to a mechanic, and while he waits for it to be fixed, he decides to take a walk around.

Specter, not surprisingly, turns out to be a beautiful lit­tle town full of small white houses, porches and swings, beneath trees as big as all time to give them shade. And here and there are flower boxes and flower gardens, and in addition to a fine-looking Main Street there's a nice mix of dirt,
gravel, and asphalt roads, all of them nicely drivable. My
father takes special note of these roads as he walks because, more than anything else, this is what my father loves to do. Drive. Past things. To get in cars and drive down roads all over the country, all over the world, to drive just as slowly as the law will allow—although the law, especially as it pertains to speed limits, is not something Edward Bloom respects: twenty in town is too fast for him; the highways are madness. How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can't realize what is already here, outside the car window? My father remembers when there were no cars at all. He remembers when people used to walk. And he does, too—walk, that is—but he still loves the feeling of an engine rumbling, wheels rolling, the display of life framed in the windows in front and back and on all sides. The car is my father's magic carpet.

Not only does it get him places, but it shows him places. A car . . . he drives, is driven, so slowly, and takes so long to get from here to there that some of his important business deals are done in cars. Those who have appointments with him follow this procedure: they find out where he is on this or that day, and figure that, being such a slow driver, he will remain in the general vicinity for most of the rest of the week, then they fly to the closest airport and rent a car. From there they hit the road and drive until they catch up with him. They will drive up beside his car and honk and wave, and my father will slowly turn—the way Abraham Lincoln would have slowly turned if Lincoln had ever driven a car, because in my mind—in the memory that has lodged itself imperturbably in my mind, my father resembles Abraham Lincoln, a man with long arms and deep pockets and dark eyes—and he waves back, and pulls over, and whoever needs to speak to him gets in on the passenger side, and this person's deputies or lawyers will get in the back, and as they continue to drive along these beautiful wandering roads their business is done. And who knows? Maybe he even has affairs in these cars, romances with beautiful women, famous
actresses. At night a small table is set between them, covered
in a white tablecloth, and, by candle light, they eat and drink, and make frivolous toasts to the future . . .

In Specter my father walks. It happens to be a nice fall day. He smiles at everything and everyone gently, and everything and everyone smiles gently back. He walks with his hands clasped behind him, peering with a friendly gaze into storefronts and alleyways, and already by this time somewhat sensitive to the sun's light, squinting therefore, which only makes him seem friendlier, and more delicate, which he is: he is friendlier and certainly more delicate than he seems, ever, to anyone. And he falls in love with this town, with its marvelous simplicity, its unadorned charm, the people who greet him, who sell him a Coke, who wave to him and smile at him from their cool porches as he passes.

My father decides to buy this town. Specter has that special somber quality, he says to himself, a quality not unlike living under water, that he can appreciate. It is a sad place, actually, and has been for years, since the railroad was shut down. Or the coal mines dried up. Or the way it seems that Specter has just been forgotten, that the world has passed it by. And though Specter did not have much use for the world anymore, it would have been nice to be part of it, to have been invited.

This is the quality my father falls in love with, and this is the reason he makes the town his own.

The first thing he does is to purchase all the land surrounding Specter, as a kind of buffer, in case some other rich, suddenly lonely man stumbles upon the town and wants to build a highway through it. He doesn't even look at the land; he only knows that it's green with pine and that he wants to keep it that way, wants what is, in effect, a self- enclosed ecosystem. And he gets it. No one knows one man
is buying the hundreds of tiny parcels that are up for sale, just as no one knows it when every house and store in town is bought, one by one, over a period of about five or six years, by someone other than anybody somebody else knows. Not for a while anyway. There are people who are moving, and there are businesses that are closing, and these are not difficult to purchase at all, but to those who like thin
gs fine just as they are and who want to stay in one place, a letter is sent. The letter offers to buy their property and everything on it for a handsome price. They are not asked to leave, to pay rent, or to change anything but the name in which the house—every house—and store—every store—is owned.

And in just this way, slowly but quite surely, my father buys Specter. Every square inch of it.

I imagine him quite pleased with the transaction.

For, true to his word, nothing changes, nothing but the sudden and suddenly routine appearance in town of my father, Edward Bloom. He does not call in advance, for I don't believe even he knows when he's going to make it back, but one day he will be seen by somebody. He is the lone figure standing out in the fields, or the one walking down Ninth
Street with his hands deep in his pockets. He walks through the stores he now owns and breaks a dollar or two, but he leaves the management of these stores to the men and
women
of Specter, of whom he will ask, in his soft, grandfatherly voice,
Well, now, how are things? And how is your wife, the kids?

He clearly loves the town so much, and all of the people in it, and they love him back, because it is impossible not to love my father. Impossible. This, anyway, is what I imagine: it is impossible not to love my father.

Fine, Mr. Bloom.
Everything's just fine.
We had a good month last month.
Would you like to see the books?
But he shakes his head, no.
I'm sure you have everything well under control here.
Just stopped in to say hello.
Well, I've got to go now.
Good-bye.
Say hello to your wife for me, would you?

And when the high school boys of Specter play baseball against other teams from other schools, he might be seen—his tall dark gauntness—alone in the stands in his three-piece suit, watching the proceedings with the proud, detached quality with which he watched me grow.

Each time he comes to Specter he stays with a different family. No one knows who it will be, or when, but there is always a room ready for him when he asks, and he always asks, as though it will be as a favor to a stranger.
Please, if it wouldn't be too much trouble.
And he will eat with the family and sleep in the room and in the morning be on his way. And he always makes his bed.

“I
RECKON MR. BLOOM
will have himself a soda on a day as hot as this one,” Al says to him one day. “Let me get one for you, Mr. Bloom.”

“Thank you, Al,” my father says. “That will be fine, actually. A soda will be fine.”

He sits on a bench in front of Al's Country Store, doing nothing. Al's Country Store—he smiles at the name, and tries to cool down in the shade beneath the overhang. Just the tips of his black shoes jut out into the bright sunlight of this summer's day. Al brings him the soda. Another man named Wiley is there, and this old man chews on the end of a pencil, and stares at my father as he drinks. Wiley had been the sheriff in Specter for a while, then the pastor. After being the pastor he became the grocer, but by this time, talking to my father in front of Al's Country Store, he does nothing at all. He is retired from everything but talking.

Wiley says, “Mr. Bloom, I know I've said it before. I know I have. But I will say it again. It is great what you've done with this town.”

My father smiles.

“I haven't done anything with this town, Wiley.”

“That's just it!” Wiley says, and laughs, and Al laughs, and my father laughs, too. “We think that's great.”

“How is that soda, Mr. Bloom?”

“Refreshing,” my father says. “It's quite refreshing, Al. Thank you.”

Wiley has a farm a mile out of town. It is one of the first worthless things my father ever bought.

“I have to say what Wiley says,” Al says. “Not every man could come and buy a whole town for the love of it.”

My father's eyes are almost closed; it won't be long now before he can't go outside without powerful sunglasses on, his eyes become so sensitive to the light. But he can accept these good words with grace.

“Thank you, Al,” he says. “When I saw Specter, I knew I had to have it. I don't know why except to say it's so. I had to have it all. I suppose in part it has to do with circles, with entireties. It is very difficult for a man such as myself to settle for a piece of something. If part of something is good, the whole of it can only be better. And as far as Specter is concerned, this is certainly the case. To have it all—”

“But you don't,” Wiley says, still chewing on his pencil. His eyes move from Al to my father.

“Wiley,” Al says.

“Well, it's the truth!” he says. “Can't be wrong to say it if it's so.”

My father turns to Wiley slowly, because my father has this special talent: just by looking at a man he can tell what the man's motivation is in saying a thing, whether or not he is honest or true or trying for more than is right. It's a kind of power, and it's one of the reasons he became so rich.

And he can tell that Wiley thinks he is telling the truth.

“Well, that can't be, Wiley,” he says. “That is, not as far as I know. I've been over every inch of this town either on foot or in my car, or seen it from the air, and I feel sure I've purchased it all. In its entirety. The whole kit and caboodle. It's a perfect circle.”

“Fine then,” Wiley says. “I won't bring up that patch of ground with the shack on it between where the road stops and the lake starts that just might be hard to find by foot or car or to see from the air, and just might not be on any map, or how whoever owns it has a piece of paper you've never seen to sign, Mr. Bloom. Because you and Al have all the truth with you over there. Don't know what I'm talking about, I guess. My apologies to you who knows better.”

W
ILEY IS KIND ENOUGH
to tell my father how to get there, how the road seems to end where it doesn't, and how the lake seems to be where it isn't, and how hard it would be for anybody to think to find this strange place: a swamp. A shack in a swamp. And so my father drives until the road seems to end, but when he gets out of his car it's clear that beyond the trees and vines and dirt and grass, the road is there, the road goes on. It has been reclaimed by nature, by the lake now too high for its own banks. In three inches of swamp water is more stagnant life than an ocean could hold; at its edge, where the muck hardens and warms, life itself begins. He walks into it. The swamp swallows up my father's shoes. He keeps walking. The water rises, the ooze clings to his trousers as he sinks. It feels good.

He keeps walking, no trouble seeing in the dim light. And all of a sudden there is a house ahead—a house. He can't believe that such a thing remains upright, that any weight will not be taken down in this soft earth, but there it is, not a shack at all but a real home, small but clearly well built, with four good sides and smoke coming out of a chimney. As he approaches the waters draw back, the ground hardens, a path is there for him to follow. And he thinks, smiling, how clever, and how lifelike: a path is provided at the very last moment, when one needs it least.

On one side of the house is a garden, and on the other there are wood piles as tall as he is himself. In a window box, a row of yellow flowers.

He makes his way to the door and knocks.

“Hello!” he calls out. “Is anybody home?”

“Sure,” a young woman's voice calls back.

“May I come in?”

There's a pause, and then, “Wipe your feet on the mat.”

My father does just that. He pushes the door gently open and stands there, looking around at what is an impossible cleanliness and order: in the middle of the blackest backwater he has ever seen, he is staring at a warm, clean, comfortable room. He sees the fire first, but quickly looks away. From there he glances at the mantle, on which there are a number of blue glass jars arranged in pairs, and from there he looks to the walls, which are nearly bare.